I posted what I wrote 15 years ago - well for an event a week later at The Present Company Theatorium - when it was the 10 year anniversary and was published in a literature/social studies book by Prentice Hall
here.
I will post it again this time around. This anniversary is hitting me hard. I am struck by our vulnerability - as in all of us - our fragility as human beings, and the lack of control we have over so much of our lives in reality.
I will be reading this as part of a remembrance ritual we will be doing on Governor's Island. The piece I have written that will be performed in the house next week - and we are rehearsing this week - is
'Merde!' that I wrote in response to the anxiety I could not shake after the terrorist attack in Brussels earlier this year. You can read my interview about it
here.
In my experience these events shake us to our core, without our permission.
I hope to share one of these days with you as we explore that territory further...in the best way I know how, together in a room that we inhabit and bear witness to one another...
But for now, here is what I wrote 15 years ago. I cannot believe it has been that long. But it has.
Julia Lee Barclay
(written for reading
at The Present Company on September 18, 2001)
T.S. Eliot’s words in Four Quartets:
“Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feelings,
undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to
conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot
hope
To emulate - but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under
conditions
That seem unpropitious.
But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”
Someone else’s words.
That’s what I thought the flyer for this event said. If you want to read someone else’s
words. And I was relieved, and thought,
of course, someone else’s words. Not
mine. Who has words for this? I don’t.
I flipped through T.S. Eliot, some of it held, but not all. Flipped frantically through Yeats, and most
of that didn’t hold either. I looked
through my library last night of poems and plays and fiction and remarkably,
none of it held. I thought, that’s it,
it’s all done. We have to start from
scratch. I’ve never felt that way about
any other event. The words don’t hold
up. Ancient words even. Not a dent.
I so wanted to find someone else’s words, to comfort, soothe, explain,
reconcile, anything. I don’t want to be
left here typing electronic dots on a screen.
There is only one phrase from Yeats that keeps racing through my mind
“the best lacked all conviction and the worst were filled with passionate
intensity”. And then I don’t know where
I stand in that dialectic either. I
confront my own self-righteous indignation at other people’s self-righteous
indignation. My friends and I make
cookies for firemen. Singing in the Rain
seems like the best film ever made. Then
I talk Middle-Eastern politics and think I’m enlightening people. Then I see a wall of hand made fliers with
pictures and names of the missing, thousands of them, on the walls of Bellevue
from the M15 and cry, having just given a plate of cookies to a rescue worker
who’s been at ground zero for four days and is hungry. He is talking to the bus driver about being
called up to serve as an army reservist.
His eyes are moist with exhaustion.
He is absurdly grateful for cookies.
I am absurdly grateful he took them.
I look away and have no words to say to him but “thank you.” I fear he will die.
All the stories, endless stories - I saw it on television, I
saw the gray cloud coming towards me, I saw it on a roof, from the train, from
the bridge, from the Promenade, from the Avenue, heard it on the phone, felt it
in my building, was covered in ash, surrounded by midnight, pushed down the
stairs by the blast, knew someone, know someone who knows someone who.....
Then the theories, endless theories - this means global
capitalism will prevail, this means we will be nuked, this means “they” must
pay, this means we are finally paying, this means we will be better people,
worse people, more scared, more strong, more something - always different from
what we were on September 10. We now
supposedly love more, hate more, are in shock, are grieving, need counseling,
don’t need counseling, should not watch TV, should watch TV, should talk to
people, don’t have to talk to people....
Then the first reactions - need to see people, wish we were
in love or are glad to be so, cling to the familiar, attack Muslims for no
reason, protect Muslims from those who attack them, yell at our credit card
companies, go to work, stare at useless letters typed onto useless computer
screens, understand people in Beirut who stayed in their bombed out city and
cling to New York City as home, flee the City and wonder why anyone stays, try
to get back to the City from out of town, cry, panic, feel comforted, pray,
meditate, do yoga, go to church, go to AA meetings, drink ourselves silly,
scroll through email, talk on the phone, wonder when to breathe, tell jokes,
cry, hug people for dear life, listen to stories, tell stories, look into
people’s eyes, stranger’s eyes, for the first time...
“Slouching towards Bethlehem, waiting to be born.” (Yeats)
“And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.” (Eliot)
At least there are clues left in the books, a burnt and
charred map, some of it obsolete but not all.
I hope to scratch through this maze with all of you here now, make
tunnels, chart through the tunnel, rebuild the next world, not throwing away
all of the old but letting go of what no longer fits. We aren’t alone. We never have been, and I am not alone and
never have been, because where I am is where I am not. And where we are is where we are not.
